(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[David Stockhoff]

On 4/12/2012 4:15 PM, António Marques wrote:
> António Marques wrote:
>> Why think that how a society treats its prisoners will filter down to
>> how people treat each other in general and not the reverse?
>
> (I'm ready to believe a harsh penal system will result in a more 
> violent society, but not necessarily that a milder one will result in 
> a less violent one.)

So you see that a harsh penal system is a trap, since it can be 
ratcheted up but never down. Worse than harshness in its pernicious 
effect on society, however---and yet harshness always bubbles up in 
these discussions as though it were the only relevant dimension---is 
arbitrariness.

So it's not just a side note that black/poor men get imprisoned and 
executed at a higher rate in the US compared with whites and the rich, 
guilty and innocent alike. It's the very core of how the system 
/actually/ /works/. It's a failure that stains every state and every 
branch of government.

Fortunately, it's no longer "fashionable" to not care about that.